Murray and Churchill: Mere Theistic Evolution

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

@structureoftruth

his objection to evolution is more on the scientific side (which I find myself disagreeing with more and more as I become more familiar with the evidence for evolution -

I don’t think that is precisely it. I think he is grasping for the words. Look what he says about ID:

Indeed, my main reservation about ID is whether the inference to intelligent design is not better thought of as a meta-physical inference, rather than as a scientific inference. My inclination would be, not to offer an alternative scientific theory to the current paradigm, but just to question that paradigm’s explanatory adequacy and to supplement it with a philosophical postulate of a designer.

That is a fairly large departure, for example, from @pnelson’s view of ID. I think it might be better said that he disagrees with the philosophy of TE. I think I agree with him there. We were discussing this on another thread:

@swamidass

The tendency among TE (exhibit @Jay313) is to take science as a nearly total description of the physical world, without careful attention to its limits. The tendency is to doubt and question any warrant for believing things about the physical world based on the testimony of Scripture. This, it seems, is hard to reconcile coherently with traditional or evangelical Christianity.

In contrast, we could take science and Scripture as legitimate but partial descriptions of the physical world. We do not expect them to be articulating them same things to us, nor do we limit Scripture to the realm of values (e.g. NOMA). Instead, we think that they each have legitimacy, even if we don’t know quite how to give an account of how they describe the same world.